admin
THE media reports put out by the Qatari news service Al Jazeera about gold and money laundering in South Africa and Zimbabwe certainly need to be investigated, and the Zimbabwean angles need to be investigated by Zimbabwean agencies.
Investigative journalism has its uses. It can highlight concerns that some people may have and can bring into public consciousness a range of issues. But journalists are not judges sitting in open court and their conclusions can be wildly wrong, partially wrong and sometimes right.
A media organisation cannot charge, let alone convict, anyone, although some wrongly try to do so.
The Zimbabwean investigation appears to be two-fold, within the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which is the monopoly gold buyer and dealer, as well as the front-line agency to prevent money laundering, and the police, who have the mandate to investigate all crime.
Neither authority is sitting back. Already the Reserve Bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit has blocked a range of bank accounts of those named in the media reports while proper investigations are stepped up.
This freezing has been done before for other investigations into unrelated matters. Basically when the Reserve Bank freezes your bank account, you can still use it, but all transactions are rigidly checked and approved by the Reserve Bank. You cannot just sit on your computer and make online transactions by punching in your password.
One very useful development in recent years with the growth of digital banking is the simultaneous growth in the automatic creation of detailed “paper trails”, although the phrase is a carryover from the days when the trails were on paper, rather than being embedded in the databases of banks and central banks.
Around the world secret banking is no longer a real option with almost every account anywhere being under the active control of someone’s central bank or bank regulator.
Confidential banking is still the norm, since the regulators will never publicise normal commercial and personal banking transactions, but it is becoming ever more difficult to hide criminal or sordid, if legal, transactions.
Laws also develop. There will always be some loopholes, so you can get something that is very sordid, but has yet to be declared illegal. We have seen in Zimbabwe this sort of thing in foreign currency dealing, with the authorities having to extend the range of defined illegal transactions in order to stop some exceptionally undesirable activity.
The importance of a proper investigation cannot be overestimated. Zimbabwe has through its diligence in tracking down money laundering and the rules and regulations it has put in place, and then administered, reached a stage where the global banking community accepts that we have an honest and well-administered banking system, which makes it far easier for our wide range of legitimate businesses, as well as the Government and other State agencies, to do their routine international banking.
We fought hard under the Second Republic to get to that stage, and we need to keep that clean status. So when doubts arise, and some evidence is presented although this is obviously incomplete, we need to dig swiftly and deeply to find out what, if anything, is true or not, and in any case figure out what might have led to those allegations.
Some of the allegations were pure police work, involving security breaches at airports and the like. These again need to be looked into.
We hope there is going to be serious co-operation between the Zimbabwean authorities investigating, and we think it might well be useful for the Zimbabwean authorities to keep in contact with what is going on in South Africa. While the Zimbabwean allegations make headlines in Harare, Al Jazeera was making allegations of far more serious activity in South Africa.
While a lot of what we are talking about is fairly routine, treating the Al Jazeera reports as just a set of tip-offs that may be true, false or misleading but which all still need to be investigated properly and better than a unit of investigative reporters seeking a headline can manage, there may well be other issues of management and perception that need to be examined.
Many of us can remember when diamonds were discovered in Manicaland early this century. There was a bit of a Wild West atmosphere and there were a lot of wild allegations and calls for Zimbabwean stones to be banned from global trade under the Kimberley Process as “blood diamonds”.
The Government took a lot of sensible decisions that saw the whole diamond industry properly organised and regulated, taxes and royalties paid and everything done by the book.
The result is the present efficient mining operations and the calls for bans on Zimbabwean diamond trade have been replaced by the total acceptance of Zimbabwe actually chairing the Kimberley Process this year, with no one objecting to us taking our turn in this rotational post.
Gold has always been a slightly odd export, being treated differently from other metals that we mine since much of the world’s gold production, despite the growing industrial applications, is still being seen as a store of value and a high proportion ending up as ingots stacked in bank vaults.
While the last official ties between gold and currencies were cut 50 or so years ago, when the US allowed the price to float, there is still a tendency for central banks to look at “gold and foreign currency reserves”.
For a country like Zimbabwe, which is looking at increasing output to 40 tonnes a year, gold can be thought of as a reserve as well as a major export, hence the continuation of the Reserve Bank monopoly on buying and dealing set up in the days when gold was cash.
We may well find that we need to be a little more open in how we manage both the reserve and export roles, and the authorities will need to look at just how trading is done to ensure that there are no loopholes that can be exploited by the dishonest, or can be misunderstood by observers.
These days Zimbabweans have come to expect much higher levels of integrity that was the case before, and so we also expect that investigations into these allegations will be full, with the guilty punished, the innocent cleared and all systems put under a bright light to see what needs to be done to ensure everything is on the up and up, and that this can be shown to be the case and maintained.
Online Reporter